Featuring: Jina Bacarr
July 7, 2018 by Jina Bacarr in category Featured Author of the Month tagged as Featured Author of the Month, historical romance, Jina Bacarr, kindle scout
Jina Bacarr : July Featured Author
Jina Bacarr discovered early on that she inherited the gift of the gab from her large Irish family when she penned a story about a princess who ran away to Paris with her pet turtle Lulu. She was twelve. She grew up listening to their wild, outlandish tales, and it was those early years of storytelling that led to her love of history and traveling.
She enjoys writing to classical music with a hot cup of java by her side. She adores dark chocolate truffles, vintage anything, the smell of bread baking and rainy days in museums. She has always loved walking through history—from Pompeii to Verdun to Old Paris.
The voices of the past speak to her through carriages with cracked leather seats, stiff ivory-colored crinolines, and worn satin slippers. She has always wondered what it was like to walk in those slippers when they were new.
Thanks from a Featured Author! by Linda O. Johnston
July 6, 2018 by Linda O. Johnston in category Pets, Romance & Lots of Suspense by Linda O. Johnston tagged as Featured author, Linda O. Johnston, mystery, Romance; suspense, thanks
I was so delighted last month to see that I was A Slice of Orange’s featured author for June!
The post had a picture of me holding one of my books, plus it contained some of my covers in several of my series, including both romance and mystery. It also contained a description of me and my writing. It looked great!
I don’t use social media as much as I should, but first thing I thought of was sharing the post on my Facebook page to let people know about it—which I did.
And now, on my usual post on the 6th of each month—July 2018 this time—I want to thank A Slice of Orange for featuring me!
The Author Store [Part Two]
July 5, 2018 by Tracy Reed in category Writing
Happy July…smile.
Last month I started talking about my Author Store. I finally have it up and running. That’s the good news. Now for the bad or not as good as I would like it news. No sales, yet. However, there’s been plenty of traffic. Last month the store had almost one thousand visitors. YEAH! But no sales so far.
I have to admit I thought this would be easy, especially because I come from a retail background. What I forgot is this is a new venture and most new ventures need time to garner momentum.
So what’s my plan? Post about the store on social media. Run Facebook ads and possibly reach out to some bloggers and do giveaways.
I’m also working on a marketing campaign for the boxes. The Facebook ads are great and so are the blog posts and mentions, but it’s that in your face mentality that will hopefully generate sales.
Here’s a little info on my Author Store. I’m using Shopify. I already have a store on Shopify and feel comfortable with them. They have amazing customer service.
Before I switched to Shopify, I designed my own site in Adobe Muse. I liked it, but when I decided to offer signed print books as well as set up a store, I knew I had to switch to a shopping cart system. I could have gotten Shopify Lite, which would allow me to add a cart to my existing site for only $9.99 per month. It was too complicated to attach my old site to this vehicle. Instead, I opted for the basic Shopify plan which gave me more options.
Switching to Shopify gave me access to some really amazing templates and things I wasn’t able to do with Adobe Muse. One of the cool things about using one of their FREE templates, is you can adjust it for your needs. I did some minor tweaking to a free template and was very surprised when Shopify complimented me.
Another added perk to using Shopify, is the KIT VA Bot. This is one of my favorite tools. Kit sends me data based on internet activity and how it might relate to the products in my store. As well as marketing suggestions. I’ve tried Kit on Facebook Ads, but they weren’t as targeted as I’d hope. However, Kit is good for social media posts. Shopify also offers pretty good analytics. They may not be as detailed as Google, but they’re pretty good. There are other website hosts you can use, but Shopify happens to be my favorite.
So what’s in my store? I have curated a small selection of items to start: A mug, book plates and subscription boxes. In the next few months, if not sooner, I’ll be adding exclusive print books. I don’t want to overload my readers with a lot of choices in the beginning. I want to keep things fresh, which may mean rotating the inventory.
In the beginning, there will be a lot of trial and error and much needed feedback as to what to offer. But I believe my Author Store will become a valuable and profitable asset for me.
If you’d like to see my store, stop by www.readtracyreed.com.
Have an amazing month.
Happy 4th!
July 4, 2018 by H. O. Charles in category Apples & Oranges by Marianne H. Donley tagged as 4th of July, Family, fun, KidsHappy Fourth of July!
Co-Creating Characters by Will Zeilinger and Janet Elizabeth Lynn
July 3, 2018 by Janet Elizabeth Lynn and Will Zeilinger in category Partners in Crime by Janet Elizabeth Lynn & Will Zeilinger tagged as co-writing, crime fiction, mysteries, writing partners
CO-CREATING CHARACTERS
by
Will Zeilinger
Question from a guest at one of our recent book events: “You two write crime fiction but how do you come up with some of your characters? Are they like, people you know—people like me?”
We get asked that question more often than you’d think, and the answer is that creating characters is probably one of the aspects of a story we spend the most time discussing.
Since we are co-writing the fifth book in the Skylar Drake Mysteries, our main characters are pretty much fleshed out. In each story, we reveal a little more about their personalities and histories. But these were developed before we ever wrote a word.
We made a profile of each character which included their backgrounds, their physical description, their likes and dislikes, and added any little quirks they might have. Please understand when we say quirks, we’re not mocking or making fun of a person’s physical or mental challenges, rather, some of the people we’ve known are downright weird.
This is the same process we’ve used for new characters in subsequent stories. Some of the “quirky” traits are more pronounced in some characters than in others, to the point that we always seem to find a character for our story who is plainly odd.
As to whether our characters are disguised versions of real people—We’d have to say, no. Not really. We like to “people watch” at malls, concerts, airports, the checkout line, at church and even in our writers’ groups.
When we were both working full-time, we found a never-ending supply of personalities and quirks in the people we worked with every day.
For instance, one of us worked with a person who would sit at lunch and eat in a circular pattern around his plate – usually clockwise. If you asked him a question or distracted him in any way, he would stop and return to the top or “12 o’clock” position on his plate and start over. This person had a management position but clearly qualified as quirky. We haven’t used this quirk yet, nor the one of the woman who would not eat or drink anything purple.
We’ve even drawn on classmates from childhood, high school or those we’d met on a few of our first minimum-wage jobs.
From our discreet observations, we write character sketches, talk about them and morph them into a unique personality.
These “people watching” experiences for character development also lead us to great conversational snippets that we use in some of our dialog. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “You can’t write this stuff.” And in truth, sometimes great characters or dialog falls into our lap.
In our fourth co-written mystery, Slick Deal, you’ll see how Skylar Drake and Casey Dolan react with quirky characters to work out the murder. With our fifth Skylar Drake Mystery in the works, we are still discussing and creating characters for his latest adventure—and yes…we are still married!
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